CHART OF THE DAY: Android's Insane Fragmentation

Android is a seriously fragmented operating system, and it's only getting more fragmented.

OpenSignal, which makes an app that measures network performance, produced the following chart on the state of Android based on its users. It used the last 682,000 downloads of its app to produce the chart.

It says there are 11,868 distinct Android devices, up from 3,997 Android devices last year.

While this sounds like a mess for developers, Google has 1 million apps in its Google Play app store for Android. That's more than Apple has for its App Store. So, the fragmentation isn't turning off developers.

And the fragmentation of Android is the reason it's the most popular smartphone operating system in the world. Handset makers have used thousands of versions of Android to push the operating system around the world.